What a lot of hot air

There seems little doubt that we humans, especially in the northern hemisphere, are pumping too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that this is likely to have an impact on our weather systems. The also seems little doubt that changes need to be made to our collective behaviour if we are to prevent the doomsayers' predictions.

The UK alone contributes but a small percentage to overall global CO2 emissions, so on a micro (UK-only) level the political debate on global warming seems quite removed from our everyday lives of getting to and from work or visiting our local supermarket.

On one level the government's message should be taken seriously and that we should all be doing what we can: cycling everywhere, installing solar heating and erecting wind turbines. If you were to spend the £20,000 or so that it would cost for both solar heating and a wind turbine you would struggle to ever see a financial return; that is, if the local planners allowed you to go ahead.

The mixed messages start to emerge when you understand how government finances work and how every government is actually addicted to motor transport, to the point that new railway lines will not be built (or re-opened) if there is a threat to revenues generated by car journeys. Governments aren't actually addicted to cars, it is just the billions raised from the tax on fuel, road tax and from the anticipated road charging schemes.

On the one hand cars are bad and on the other they're rather very good. How does, or how should, the government handle this dilemma?

From a communications perspective it is tricky. You can't go back to a time when we were less dependent on the car, but governments must re-evaluate their financial need for car-generated revenues. As the M1 grinds to a halt at Luton every morning around 7am, there surely has to be more the transport equation than what it would cost the government if none of us were in our cars. The costs of having hundreds of thousands of people sat going nowhere all around the UK costs businesses millions and these are the costs that we should be looking to reduce.

Governments need to put money into real transport alternatives, to re-open the rural branch lines, to promote bus services and to re-engineer the urban landscape so that we can actually use our cars less.